


Collateral

by hypaereon



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, I'm...sorry?, there's porn i swear, wow this took way too fricken long
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-04
Updated: 2014-12-04
Packaged: 2018-02-28 03:04:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2716544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypaereon/pseuds/hypaereon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>' He just...wanted from her. '</p><p>*Prompt: Iron Bull and an ethereal F!Lavellan mage Inquisitor get it on. Applicable complications ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collateral

She seemed to move through rooms. That was how he described it, in his head. People like Cassandra and Cullen and Vivienne and him, they stomped into rooms, but she _moved_ through them. He thought it was significant that there was not a better word for it. She floated around, eyes snapping from thing to thing like bright little hornets, as quick as they were clever.

Solas liked her. Well, Solas _loved_ her, if Bull had the right of it; not that it mattered much. Ellana was nearly half his age, and spoke often of her steely ‘admiration’ for the little baldy. If Bull knew women, and he did, that was one way to tell you, in their language, that nothing wet or slippery would be transpiring between you and they. He initially took this to mean she wasn’t much for sex at all, tightly buttoned-up little elf saarebas that she was, but then later he’d spotted Sera looking at their tiny Inquisitor in a less-than-professional way—and Lavellan looking back. The look they shared was one of innocent, vague curiosity—harmless—but it stirred his gut. Only three things stirred Bull’s gut.

Food. Blood. Sex.

\--

Watching Ellana’s fingers was among Bull’s newest, and strangest, of hobbies. _I don’t know, I like them,_ he’d think, imagining himself barking down the part of him that frowned as deep as the Qun at his childish fixation with her. They were small and long, like all of her, and white, whiter than cream. She used them quickly and deftly to fix, prod, mend, whirl a staff around and sing magic out of the ground.

Once outside the Fallow Mire, on a night that stank of rot and swamp gas, Bull was nursing a slung arm and fumbling with his eyepatch, his tent dyed orange from a candle. He’d hurt his arm diving forward to take the blow of a mace for Lavellan, shattering most of his elbow. She came up behind him that night, like a ghost, to lift the eyepatch off and over his scalp.

Then, Ellana silently bent to wet a strip of linen in his washbasin and started to dab at his ruined eye. It felt like a ripple of understanding passed between them; he would not thank her, and she would not apologise for his arm. Lavellan was young, younger than all of them, born only twenty summers ago. She was a child of the Blight, so eager to please her councillors, and took failures very personally. It was a shortcoming in a commander, but Bull found himself forgetting about Lavellan being his commander more often than not anyway, and so thought little of correcting it. He could handle an elbow. _For now, I like my Lavellan sugar-sweet,_ he’d thought back then, watching her clean him so gingerly with his good eye.

\--

A few times, he got her out of the castle to come have drinks with the little people. She got on surprisingly well with Krem, Dorian and Varric would buy drinks all night, and Sera was of course always thrilled to see her without her ‘hats’ on. Ellana handled drink like a kitten, and more often than not her forays into tavern life would end with that ring-for-service altar boy, Cullen, showing up to hoist her mead-loose body off to bed. _Alone, I’d like,_ Bull would think to himself glumly. Until then, though, those were always his favourite nights. No politics— _no RUBBISH!_ Sera would cheer—just him, his guys, and Ellana laughing and dressed in cotton. She looked good in simple stuff. Coats and buttons and leather were all fine, sure, but he could tell she _herself_ didn’t like it too much, and that alone made all the difference. She’d let her ink-coloured hair shake loose past her shoulders after the first hour of drink. That was around the time that Bull would begin to imagine making fists in it.

“She’s so young,” Sera said to him one night, kicking her legs over a counter and balancing a cup in one hand. She was watching Ellana try to follow one of Krem’s joke. Her eyes were so wide and earnest, she looked like a kid hearing a Chantry story.

Hearing it out loud made Bull wince. “Yeah, I know.”

“It’s easy to lose, innit? When she’s talking up there, all high and what. She looks like a proper leader. But…”

 _Yeah, I know,_ he repeated in his head. But her face is lineless, but her back is straight, but her smile is real, but she’s so small, so young, so _young_.

His gut, for the first time he could actually place, stirred for a fourth reason. Not a good one.

\--

She was different with everyone. In that way, she was an excellent actor, and a respectable diplomat in her own right. It was something that bled into every interaction one had with her.

With Solas, she was tranquil, level, inquisitive. He appreciated the way she chased his thoughts with more questions, admiring her wit and brevity, rewarding it with more trust and courtesy than he ever had Bull. With Sera and Varric, she freely proffered her positivity, her humour, knowing they would like it, knowing it would warm them to her. To her ambassadors, she was the picture of grace, something beautiful and rare and wonderful, precisely the sort of figure whose cause people felt compelled to flock to.

And she had other masques to put on, too. She could be sweet as a chantry laysister, eyes big as saucers to _really_ sell it, mouth shy and careful, hands cloud-gentle. Then she could be steely and indomitable; that one she wore for judgments, negotiations, facing down the worst that came. Bull was not yet certain what type of masque she wore with him; he didn’t know what she wanted from him, if anything at all, besides some basic modicum of loyalty and respect. He didn’t know what her game was, yet.

Bull was only certain in her sincerity when she was impulsive; that one, that was all her. No pressures bearing down from other directions. When Ellana Lavellan’s eyes got hard and slanted, and she looked more catlike, more wild and Dalish than ever, there was no one telling her to be that way. That was how she looked in the heat of the fight, focussed on nothing but the end, and them; the ones fighting beside her, _for_ her.

There was nothing like having her eyes fall on you in a fight. The writhing wink in them, it fucked with his head in the best, most indulgent way. He could be that way forever, he’d think stupidly, some animal in the vision of quick, sinewy Lavellan that she was intrinsically, inherently, primally convinced to protect.

\--

“Nice! Fork it up, mimsy quim. A loss is a loss, ha!” Sera clapped one hand on the table, drumming out her victory, and held out the other to Krem. “Aye, that’s it! Two ‘undred bigguns. Nice and easy!”

“You’re good,” Krem grumbled, searching his pockets. “Sure I’ve not been cheated?”

“Only by the Maker, when he was handin’ out brains and what!” Sera giggled.

Bull watched his friend hand over his coin with a grin. Krem had been getting cocky, anyway. About time someone nailed his arse to the wall at cards. _And Sera gets even more colourful when she’s pleased, so that’s fun to watch unfold._

He had less energy for tavern tawdriness these days. Perhaps it was the daunting tasks involved in securing and holding a political coalition; perhaps he just fucking hated winter, and he’d never seen a worse one than Skyhold’s. He had several reasons to be less than his usual drunk and roaring self.

And there was Ellana, whom he was certain would be pacing her study or otherwise sat on the floor of it, surrounded by open books and loose pages like he so often discovered her to be. Everything was taking its toll on their little leader, too; she appeared so tired these days, so solemn. He could see the little twitch behind her face whenever someone called her ‘herald’ or ‘prophet’ or, worst of all, ‘your Holiness’. She didn’t like the fame of it all; Bull guessed her life before all this mess had been more or less about books, and plants, and fucking halla. Probably full of quiet, airy days and campfire-stained nights. _She’s never lived like this before, and if you squint, it shows._

Now more than ever he wished he could coax her downstairs for a cup with him. But she was always shrunken behind her wall of human councillors, each always with a new case to plea or problem to raise. He only ever saw her when she had him saddled along with her to some directive outside the Hold, and then, she was all business, _sers_ and _messeres_ and _urgents_ and _dires._ Business looked good on her, and all. But Bull knew she didn’t revel in it the way the altar boy did, or the Seeker, or the respective Antivan and Orlesian courtiers. Ellana preferred honesty, to resonate with others in that rich and quiet way she did. It was a shame she so rarely got a chance to.

“Oi. Stop _broodin’_ ,” Sera chided, leaning towards him on an elbow. “Not tonight, yeah? I’m on a streak. No glummies!”

“He’s only lovesick,” Krem snickered, smooth face bright as sun. “Been that way all week, and the one before. ‘Aven’t you noticed by now?”

“Oh, _aye_ , we all have,” Sera said, smooth as sailing, right past any flummoxed thing Bull might’ve drummed up. “No use draggin’ your feet, though, innit?”

“No clue what you mean.” He truly didn’t. _Most of it, anyway._ “Don’t be a dick.”

Krem clicked his tongue. “Tou _chy_.”

“How long have you thought this?”

Krem took a lofty sip of his drink. “I knew ever since you stopped tupping these tavern girls ‘cos you were scared it’d frighten her off, boss.”

“Bull’s only got the fever. I calls it glow fever, ha! Nice, innit? Yeah, loads have got a touch of it. Fever for our elfy glow-worm!” Sera took a sip of mead, smacked her lips afterwards, and sighed with self-satisfaction. Then she began to tick off her fingers. “Let’s see, you’re one. Baldy Solas _wishes_ he was. That Warden might, if he weren’t such a gloomy granddad!” Sera’s laugh became a hiccup halfway through.

“No one’s got _any_ ”—

 “Oi, not done!” Sera quipped. “And that templar man too, he thinks she’s _lush_. Not that he should, or wants to. Just look twice!”

Bull was Ben-Hassrath. He was too seasoned not to notice the altar boy’s childlike proneness to blunder around Lavellan. He just never figured his qunari training would manifest in such an annoying way.

Krem made a scrutinous little noise. Then, after a moment of searching Bull’s face, he balked. “Boss, you fancy _THE boss!”_

Bull groaned, rising to leave.

“I mean, you _proper_ do!”

“Aye, he proper does, I’ve been _sayin’_ so! Elfy Lavelly, see”—

Bull made his exit fast, knocking over a stool or two on the way out. He ducked out the door with a grace that only one with a triple-wide skull was practised to have. _I can finish my drink at the range, I think._

\--

The second time she touched him, she was in his tent again, this time tending to a deep, ugly cut from his shoulder to hipbone. If one of them had been here, Solas or Vivienne or Dorian might have done it, but they were not, and so Ellana had wordlessly sunk to her knees and shouldered the task. She was a good healer; Bull wondered if she had once planned to use her magic primarily for such things. He supposed the Dalish had little need for churning up great balls of fire and the like; healers with quick fingers, though, they probably needed in hordes. Moreover, his little leader had always given him the impression that she preferred helping to hurting. It made more sense to her. _Why does hurting make more sense to me?_

A part of him wanted to be quiet like her, to lie there and let her work. A part of him wanted to enjoy this, to let the tavern nights he held so close fog out of mind’s eye so she could be an Inquisitor to him, to make her strong and steel and cold in his head so he could just serve her and just _like_ it.

Then a small, impetuous thought began to turn hot at the front of his brain: How long has it been since we were alone? How long is it going to be again? What if it’s _too_ long?

A brief thing flashed into view: his life, stretched before him, years and years stacked like tiles, devoid of knowing how it feels to kiss a brainy little saarebas. He frowned at the thought, finding it instantly distasteful and utterly unacceptable. Knowing he was selfish even for thinking it, he thought anyway, _No, that’s just shit. Not gonna happen._

He turned his head. Her eyes, huge and bright, clapped onto his face, curious and startled as a field hare.

He didn’t want to frighten her. “You’re good at that,” he offered hoarsely while she applied gentle magic to the seams of the finished bits of bandages, warming them just enough to melt together. Ellana’s full little mouth made a small smile.

“Thank you,” she whispered back. Her lashes flattened to fans as she bent her gaze down once more.

Bull chewed the inside of his lower lip. “Sorry about some shit I've said. Y’know, about you being a kid. You aren’t.”

When she met his eyes next, it was a little different. There was something wide and blank there—like a hope, just one, open as a canvas for him to start something on. “You think so?”

“Course. You’re more woman than most.”

She beamed, bright as any sun. Bull felt tickled by that.

“Coming from you,” she mumbled, “that…means a lot. Thank you, Iron Bull.”

She always said it so properly. _Like a title._ “Call me Bull, if it suits you better. It’s a name, not a position.”

Ellana licked her lips. It had to be one of the more attractive nervous habits Bull had encountered in his time down South; he wondered, did she even know people felt that way when she did that? Could she really be so innocent that she had no clue what others might start thinking about when she prodded her pink little tongue around her pink little lips?

 “Bull,” she tried. “Okay. _Andaren atishan_ , Bull.”

 _Crap._ He was a damn sucker for the elvish. “Yeah, yeah. _Andy-wrench at-ee-shem_ , too.”

Ellana giggled and prodded his sizable neck. Bull smiled.

He let her enjoy the warm quiet for a few minutes, knowing how she liked it, before he couldn’t stay silent any longer. After a while, the shadows stretching across her cheekbones became too tantalising for him to ignore. _In some lights, she looks feral, like some cat._

“You should come down from your white tower more often, Boss,” Bull grunted towards her.

Ellana looked up from her work. “With…you?”

She sounded girlish; shy. Bull was endeared beyond belief. “Yeah, with me. And all the others.” He shifted, and abruptly winced at the pain of it. When she sprang to help, he waved her off, assuaging her. “Thing is, you’re too young and pretty to be walled up and shouted at all of the time. I mean, gotta have a break every once in a while, right, Boss?”

She didn’t seem to know quite what to do with what he said. Her gaze fell to the ground. “I…suppose.”

“Yeah, well, I _insist_.”

With another little smile, she returned to her work. “Alright, ser Bull. Time to stitch. This could sting just a bit.”

“Letterip!” he bellowed, folding his arms behind his head. She sighed, not without affection, and bent her head to work.

\--

She impresses him once by re-breaking her own little finger bone after audibly popping it out of spot. She got green in the face for a moment, but she didn’t double over or otherwise let it show that she wanted to be sick. He liked that. A good commander puts on a brave face. He’d bet they taught her to do that young, rearing her to one day be a Keeper and all. He only dimly understood the subject, but if he had it right, that meant she’d been expecting a role like this since the first time her magic flared up. It made him feel a kinship with her. The destiny that hummed inside her, the one that compelled her to command others, felt a little like the one he’d been given by the Qun; to fight.

She racked up a nice variety of blacks-and-blues that day. She had one cut, above an eyebrow, that seemed to dress her face like those tattoos that flared and spoked across her cheeks. Bull liked them. They made her look a little feral, a little wicked. Balanced out the creamy young fullness of everything else about her face.

When she sent ice crushing down on a man by closing her fist, hair dark and flying, he blinked, and everything before him shuddered.

\--

“Hurt.”

Bull looked up. Cole was above him suddenly, legs dangling over the battlements. Bull had been scraping the blades of his axe, chipping away at imperfections. He snarled at the spirit-in-boy’s-skin; the way it flitted in and out at its leisure gave him chills.

“What is it, uh—what d’you like being called?”

“ _Cole_. You pretend to forget, because you don’t like that the name makes me revived, riveting, _real_. I know that.”

“Ugh. _Well_.” Bull scratched behind his left horn, right where the skin got rough, began growing into skull. “What is it, Cole?”

The boy-spirit-thing shifted. “The loudness in your head drew me over. It’s been rushing around the courtyard all day, spilling and crashing over everything.”

Bull looked away. It was all gold from where he could see, falling leaves and idly chatting soldiers. “That right?”

“ _Yes_.” Cole dropped down to Bull’s side with an impossible lack of sound. “I am sorry if I bothered you. I heard your guilt, loud as a siren, and I came.” The boy shuffled nervously. “You know, I do not think it should make you guilty. Pain should not have to come from love, _does_ not.”

Bull glared at the boy-spirit. It quailed under his look, but did not run. “I am sorry,” Cole said again, bowing slightly. “I am compelled to _help_. I heard your head, and heard it telling you lies, and thought it might help you to hear a true thing.”

He turned around to ask him what he meant by that. The boy was completely gone.

\--

A fortnight later, after Ellana bests one of Bull’s Chargers at a coin tossing game, she drains her mug, slams it upside-down on the table, laughs loudly, and Bull sweeps her up in his arms.

He has had too much to drink—so has everyone—and she is so light and small, laughing like air and music, and between giggles she calls him _lathallin._

He doesn’t know what it is, exactly—or what it’s named, anyway—but a thing inside him just _clicks_. He looks at her, sparrow-boned and bright and beautiful, and he _likes_ it, he likes being her ‘lathallin’. He doesn’t know what it means precisely, but he knows it is different from lethallin, the word she uses for everyone else. He thinks he remembers her using _lath_ for ‘love’ once, when deciphering a glyph in some muck cave somewhere.

When he lets her feet touch ground, she’s still breathless and wide-eyed, clinging to him. Everything is orange and noise and din but her. Bull spares a look up to search for disapproving eyes, but no one is watching them; Dorian has replaced Ellana at the table and challenged Sera to the same game, to the roaring approval of the tavern. He looks down at her again, a head and some shorter and staring expectantly with her blinking, mead-bright eyes. It occurs to him: _I want to. I really do._

While attention is still elsewhere, Bull, his Inquisitor’s wrist in his grip, begins to wordlessly lead her towards the door. She offers so little resistance that it feels as if he is guiding a sheet.

The air hits Bull’s face like a promise. Some of her officers are across the way, chattering idly to each other by the straw bowman’s targets. Spying a dark enclave beneath one of the Hold’s large, imposing stone stairwells, he began to move. Lavellan followed with, if he wasn’t mistaken, something like eagerness.

He steers her back to the cool stone wall and looks at her. For a moment, he is again stricken by her beauty. She is young, creamy, elven, soft. All the things the world wants, all the things he isn’t. The bones in her face are fine and slim, and he reaches out to touch the base of her chin. To his surprise and pleasure, Ellana leans her face into the gesture, giving him more of her to touch. It is a small thing to do, but it excites Bull as well as any paws grazing his crotch. _Oh, crap, there I go again. Always too far, too much, too soon._ He forces anything less than innocent out of his mind; he knows who the both of them are.

She is silent. Waiting. He will have to guide this, he realises.

“Ellana…” he begins, breaking off, noticing he has said her first name aloud, _to_ her. With a bit of a start, it occurs to him he never has before. To her face, she’s always _Inquisitor_ , _Commander_ , and only at the fondest of moments, _Lavellan_. No one (apart from Sera, with her crowing laughs of _Lavelly!_ ) used anything else with her that he ever witnessed. From the look dawning on her face, he can see that she has noticed it, too, and if her open little mouth served any indication, she liked it.

“Yes?” she answers quietly.

He feels something rip open inside him. Everything spills out, like water from a punctured dam, like guts from a ruined stomach, like corks popping. “I like you,” he starts. He shakes his head, clumsily scratching a horn against a stone by mistake. “No. Shit. More than that.” When he looks at her, everything he’d spent decades turning himself into shed like fur in spring. He feels so stupid, big, clumsy, unpractised. In a fucked way, it’s _good_.

“It’s okay,” she rushes quietly, so quick to mend and fix and solve. “I-I feel that too, Bull”—

“You sure?” _She’s gotta be sure._ It means everything. If she isn’t, if she’s just giving him what he wants, then, well, he can’t take it. He wouldn’t want to. “Ell, this is important.”

“Sure,” she breathes at once. “Yes, yeah, I’m _sure_.”

His mouth moves on hers like some scavenger’s, suckling sweetness and life off her lips. Ellana is easy to move and incredibly reactive; she wriggles in his grasp with delight, sighs and keens better than someone trained to. He lets his hands snake into her hair, snaring fistfuls of the dark and silky stuff, secretly enjoying how stark it is in his rough, callused, unworthy grasp.

Bull has never touched someone so exotic; so exquisite. It makes him self-conscious. It excites the _shit_ out of him.

“Yes,” she whispers whenever his hand lands somewhere new. “Yes, yes, _yes_.”

Bull has always loved an enthusiastic recipient.

\--

For months, they don’t say anything to anyone. Neither of them has to run this by the other; Bull half-expected it to stay a dirty secret entirely, and it seemed Lavellan was too new to the whole thing to know how to go about publicising it even if she wanted to.

She had him a key made. Small, silver, many-toothed. It felt like holding her in his hand.

Scaling the dark stone steps to her room made him feel almost like a new Ben-Hassrath again, dodging detection in blackness. But he’d never sought a goal as good as her before.

He had grown very accustomed very quickly to the taste of her. Oh, at first even the idea of it made her turn red as a gash; but he only had to talk her into trying it _once_ , and then he had her slick for it every time. It was the sort of intimacy Bull had dreamt often and guiltily of having with her; he’d touch everything he could while he worked, head bent, mouth fast and starving, dutiful and gleeful.

His huge fingers would dally over birdlike anklebones and shuddering patches of cream thigh. Her own fingers, quick and small, liked to grab him by the scalp, desperate and yearning, when he finally got her to the really good bits and had her moving that wicked little pelvic bone, seeking the end for herself. That was when he blurred with the smell of her; it was like warm and brine, a flavour he pictured for months before this but had never quite nailed down to this degree of arousing. Even _better_ was when she threw her legs over his horns.

They could only afford to arrange a meeting every week or so, and Bull became fixated very quickly on making them count. He did not press the issue of her virginity; it wasn’t terrifically important to him. Not yet, at least. Bull needed to demonstrate himself to her, he felt; he wanted to show her it could be enough, the two of them seeking each other’s heat in secret. He feared she’d realise her mistake if he didn’t, and pursue the sort of lover no one would scrutinise. _Like Baldy, or Altar Boy._

The sight of Lavellan waiting for him sent life zinging through every spoke of his spine.

She would be pacing sometimes. Or sat at her table, papers around, unable to really focus on anything anyway as she waited. Sometimes she would be on the bed, half-undressed, uncertain, unused to trying to look appealing for anyone. It was her _trying_ that aroused him most; he felt exceptional, walking into such a clean and beautiful place, being _wanted_ by such a clean and beautiful thing.

Each time, he had to be careful. He could not take too much, _do_ too much, or he feared he might scare her off. He taught her how to make _katoh_ with her lips. It was always an exact science—he didn’t involve as much teeth as he might’ve wanted, and he gently steered her hands from his hardness when they curiously ventured towards. She’d look at him, eyes big and dark and lusty—like staring down a heady glass of wine—and he’d swallow, hard, and tell her _next time._

She had less patience than he’d thought.  

\--

Ellana invited him to her bed after supper in the barracks one night in a manner so direct it almost startled him. After tossing her handkerchief into her bowl, smiling at the Orlesian soldier she had been speaking with at her left, and rising from the table with a grace almost divine, she slipped behind Bull’s seat, dropping a whisper of “I _need_ you tonight,” into his ear before flitting away. His head felt hot for minutes.

He waited several respectable minutes before clambering up to follow her. It always felt so weird, moving past everyone on these nights. He half-listened to the idle voices of all their friends, Solas and Sera and Varric and Dorian and Vivienne and everyone floating around him like mist, and wondered what they would think if they knew the perfect, clever woman they served had grown to want someone like him. _Would they think it’s a lark? Would they care at all?_

Bull found the path to her room particularly easy that night; there wasn’t a guard in sight, and he asked himself if Ellana might have done something to make that happen.

When he ascends to her room, it’s dim as a crypt. Ellana lit only a few candles, and the night outside her windows was moonless and unknowable. She had her legs crossed over the edge of her bed, wearing nothing. One rope of dark, long hair was swung over her pearly shoulder, dangling neatly and tauntingly near a nipple. She watched him, catlike and curious, girl-like and shy.

“Getting right to it, I see,” he said, mirthful to ease her shyness.

Ellana didn’t seem to have a clue what to say; naked, modest, she drew her knees closer and beckoned for him with her hand. He watched her white wrist when she did it; he imagined biting down there, just a bit. He pictured the noise she might make as he moved to take the proffered hand.

“Will you make me ask?” Ellana murmured once she had him by the hand, guiding him to her bed.

Bull grinned, knowing she thought he resembled a wolf when he did; knowing she liked it. “I might. I’m no mind-reader, like you, little saarebas.”

She wiggled a bit. He tried not to think too hard about her arse, sliding over silk. “That’s _blood_ _magic_ , Bull.”

“Oh? And you’re not a blood mage, eh? So what’s this?” He steered her hand south, past the loosened laces of his trousers, to where she wanted. Ellana sputtered like a freshly-reeled fish.

“It’s—w-wow.”

“ _Yeah_.” Bull wasn’t under any illusions, but it still made him feel one hundred feet tall that Ellana’s face opened up like a poppy when she touched him.

She gnawed on her lower lip. Bull wished he were that tooth. “I-I, well, um.” Blood bloomed in her pinks, and again Bull thought of poppies. Ellana reminded him of lots of things too soft and lovely to ever be put in his hand.

“It’s big, yeah. I mean, proportional; but, _I’m_ big, so. Yeah. I guess that doesn’t surprise you.”

“Does it…ever…?”

“What? Not fit?” Bull smiled. “Oh, yeah, sometimes. Usually just an issue of preparedness, though.”

“Really?” The candles winked in Ellana’s eyes. “So…I could…?”

“Yes,” he told her, easing her onto her back, “you _could_.” He immediately started moving his hand against the hot of her, where those soft little curls tickled him, where she wanted him. Ellana’s spine arched rebelliously, and as she turned her face into her pillows and started making those _pretty_ noises Bull liked so much, he leaned in close.

“I want you,” he told her. “But you have to want me, too. It won’t work otherwise.”

“I _do_ ,” she said, keening, almost whining. Bull laughed, deep in his throat.

“I hear you, then. We’re on the same team, kadan.” He kissed her ear. “I only want you to like it.”

She shuddered while his fingers moved inside her, playing her like some meticulously-tuned dinner instrument. “I will,” she sighed. “I _know_ I will. I think about it all the time.”

He closed his eyes, imagining her wriggling around in bed at night, frustrated from wanting him. Bull envied the birds that got to come and sit on her terrace all of a sudden.

“That’s good.” He kept his tone measured, recognising that she needed him to be comforting right now. He suspected there would be plenty of time for the wild stuff later, if he did this right.

All the better for Bull that he knew she liked being dwarfed by his size; she didn’t mind when he leaned forward, obscuring everything for her but the wall of his body. She trusted him, and so never felt cornered by him; it was something he wasn’t used to. Now, Bull took advantage of that and leaned over her, using his legs, stout as trees, to hold himself over her without crushing her like a bird. Ellana’s legs wound around him easily and eagerly, pulling their hips together. Bull groaned at the softness, suddenly wishing he had thought to be naked, too.

“Oh,” she sighed, blinking fairylike.

 _She likes getting me to be noisy._ Bull made a note of that. _No holds barred, then._

“Want me to have a taste of you, first?”

“I can’t wait any longer,” Ellana insisted, putting her little hands at the root of him. “ _Nuvenin ma_ , _lathallin_!”

He groaned again, from somewhere deep, loving the music of elvish in her voice. Ellana purred at what she’d done, and he took her legs in his hands and kept them steady while he eased the head of himself into her.

She arched like a bow, taut and rigid, steeling her nerves, but her eyes were open and on him.

One of his hands found its way into the pool of her hair, and he stared into the wide forever of her strange, young, fluttering and desirous eyes, beginning to rock and snap his hips into her as she began to take him inside her, cunt small and tight and close but so wanting of him it made him want to rut like an animal. He made a fist in her black-silk hair and put his rough, scarred mouth to the column of her neck, unable to keep from sucking, biting, having his fill. She dug her nails into his scalp, the muscle of his arse, cried out for her Creators, gasped _lath’ma_ in his ear. He didn’t know the translation, precisely. _I like my guess, though,_ he thought, growing drunk on her desperate cries, the velvet of her inside, the warm and _everywhere_ smell of her.  

\--

They can’t fuck _all_ the time, she explains. Her legs simply can’t support such things.

Often she claims she has trouble walking after; he’s half-convinced her wobbling is for his benefit. Once, after he bends her over behind a carefully assembled wall of chantry bookshelves and ruts into her as she bites her delighted squeals into the palm of his hand, she splays out over the table and, his pleasure leaking full and ghostly down her thighs, declares she must simply lie there for several minutes to recover. Grinning with self-satisfaction, he’d laid down beside her, loving the sight of her panting, shining, fucked to absolute exhaustion at his hand.

Now, he laughs those complaints away, sucks her ankles, bites a bit. Licks the nest between her thighs clean, full and rough and hungry how she loves it, and laughs when she comes, trilling and keening, inside of a barn in the middle of the day.

Bull never lets himself think about the price of happiness like this.

Ellana calls him ‘beautiful’ sometimes. Once, she did it as he fucked her in a tavern kitchen. Hair and sweat across her face, mouth flushed and bruised dark from attention, arse smacking against the floured table he had her propped on, she gasped, “You’re beautiful, _lathallin_ , oh, you’re beautiful.” Bull came at once, gripping her back with one hand and her thigh with the other, shuddering for many moments after as she kissed and stroked him to tranquillity.

He asks once, awkwardly, if she knows whether there’s any risk. Shuffling her feet, Ellana tells him that though it’s rare, a union like theirs _could_ produce a pregnancy, so she’s already taken precautions. Bull doesn’t pursue the subject further; Ellana knew her herbs and sprigs, and he didn’t need the play-by-play unless she meant to give it freely. He just couldn’t abide the thought of Ellana, twenty and Inquisitor and fucking put-upon enough already, having her life further spoilt by his kid in her belly.

He’s a little weirded out that he doesn’t completely mind the idea of something half-him, half-her. He imagines something falling somewhere between their height. Maybe with horns, tiny knife-ears, maybe both. Moon-coloured skin.

She takes him to Halamshiral with her. Just for backup, she says. _‘I don’t really trust anyone like I do you.’_ Vivienne comes along, and Dorian, too. For impression’s sake.

While standing alone in something ridiculous and slashed with vair, eating a fistful of curious Antivan sausage, Bull heard one of the courtiers say to Cullen, “Is that creature the _Inquisitor’s_? Surely she is not the type to keep pets!” Their nasal-heavy laughter roiled his stomach.

Guiltily but diplomatically, Cullen assured them, “My lords, you couldn’t be further from the truth. That is an esteemed mercenary working with the Inquisition, a qunari soldier of great notoriety. Not Lady Lavellan’s _lover_.”

\--

Everything flows along the same current when he’s alone with Ellana. Brain, hands, hips, cock, mouth, words. Everything he had at his disposal was running full-speed towards the singular directive of getting her to cry out something sweet, admit she loved him again, do something kinky, fucking _come_. He just… _wanted_ from her. Wanted, wanted, _wanted_ , all the fucking time. It felt red and heavy and pounding, and it had him fighting to remember the Qun verbatim. She’d bat her eyes at him, look a little innocent, and then he was backing her through some doors, getting her away from appraising eyes so he could make the look on her face _less_ innocent. Something open-mouthed and bright-cheeked, he usually opted for. Something he could think about for the next week and a half as he took himself in his own hand, imagining her open impetuous mouth, her slim, milky legs…

She asked him to her room once in daylight under the pretence of wishing to discuss the delicate nature of Qunari war customs. Moments after crossing her threshold, she whizzed him to her side in a flurry of dizzying magic, had the door pulling itself shut, and sank to her knees to bathe his cock with the kind of attention that made him wonder if he had explicitly earned a reward for something right before he fell backwards with the sound of something like a fallen wardrobe.

She rode him for the first time on a pile of merchant manifests and Antivan carpet. He realised he would have to talk her into i as often as he could manage it; she leaned away from him, tossing her face back and gasping ecstatically while she bucked and fell, her little breasts bouncing appetisingly as she practically _used_ him.

“That,” Bull panted after she’d milked him dry and fell, laughing and sweating, to his side, “was _hot_ , boss.”

She pecked him, feather-soft, on the nose. “Thought you needed breaking in, no?”

He grinned, looking into her glowing, sated face. His calm began to slip away almost at once. “Ell, you’ve got another mark. Here.” He nudged the blooming bruise on her neck with a great, grey finger.

She shrugged it off. “Oh, it’s all right. No one notices how high my collars have gotten, given how cold it is now. Sera even suspects it’s Vivienne’s influence in my wardrobe, honestly.”

Bull searched her face. “You don’t mind?”

“Hm? What?” Ellana shifted, settling into the crook of his arm, sweat starting to cool into shivering  all over her nakedness. He watched the way her slim, pale waist twisted, sinewy as a lithe forest animal. Nothing got his blood up quite like all the little things about Lavellan that were wild and alien in their Dalishness. She just _moved_ like nothing he’d ever seen.

“That they don’t know the truth. You don’t mind?”

Ellana blinked. “I thought you might.”

“Well, I don’t.” Bull looked away awkwardly. “Unless _you_ do. Your reputation matters a little more, I think.”

Ellana huffed. “What reputation? I’ve been branded an upstart of a Dalish slattern from day one.” She brushed hair from her eyes, seeming to imagine swatting at enemies just as easily. “I’m so exhausted with pretending to be something I’m not.”

Bull sighed. “Yeah, I get that. But _kadan_.” Bull gave her cheek a little tweak, something intimate and reassuring. “You’re a big name now. You do good all over. Everybody knows who _you_ are.”

She shifted nervously. “It isn’t fair. I’m hardly the one they think I am. I’m just a symbol, made up of better, cleverer people bustling underneath.”

“Hey. Don’t talk like that. We _need_ you.” Bull propped himself up on his elbows. “Yeah, we’re all of us pretty fucking good at one thing or another. But only that _one thing_. Like Ma’am, with her witch-fashion. That’s a pretty _niche_ thing, don’t you think? I’m not sure she could carry this quite like _you_ do, going on that alone.”

Ellana giggled. “Well, maybe, but Vivienne’s just one. I’m still just…me.” She shrugged those pearly shoulders. “I realise now that who I am doesn’t matter. It’s about what I have to represent. Nothing about the Inquisition can be a reflection of what _I_ want.”

Bull looked her up and down. Something inside him sank. “Kadan, are you…ah, what are you saying?”

She inched closer to put her cooling brow to his chest. She smelled so wonderful to him, of earthen sweat and spicy musk. “ _This_ is nothing to do with the Inquisition. This is _mine_.” She drew a piece of him between her teeth, tugging it gently, but hard enough to draw a speck of blood. She nursed the spot, sucking like a child. He shuddered. _My wild girl._

“I want to tell people. Friends, at the very least,” Ellana said quietly. “You’re right. I don’t enjoy lying to them.”

“Aren’t you scared of what people will say? The Herald of Andraste, shining in her white chastity, suddenly knocking boots with a one-eyed heretic freak?”

“When you put it so confidently, oh, sure, I don’t fear a thing.”

They both laughed, but he sensed her unease beneath it. Bull tucked her closer and said, when they were through, “Ellana, it’s your decision. It’d be hard to keep among friends, I get that. It could mean bad stuff. _My_ superiors sure won’t like it. We don’t even fuck for love with other members of the _Qun_.”

She frowned up at him, her eyes growing stormy like they did whenever he brought up that fine point. “I’ll think on it,” she said at last, letting him pull her close.

“Don’t let it ruin things, now,” he said loftily, sliding his fingers down the dip of her back and towards the tempting slope of her thighs. “Remember how _hard_ I had you coming not too long ago.”

Ellana dug her nails into the barrel of his chest and laughed.

\--

 

When they’ve had too much wine with everyone else downstairs, she leads him away with a crook of the finger intended to look sly but only being received as hilarious in its drunken blatancy. Bull abandons propriety thirty seconds out the door by sweeping her into his arms, just like the night he kissed her first, and carrying her to her bedroom like a new bride.

Giggling, bold with drink, she kisses him lustfully once they are locked away together and asks him in a whisper to do something ‘new’ to her. Bull instructs her to nakedness, has her lie on her stomach, and murmurs to her between slicking his fingers with his tongue. He asks her if she wants to try what he has in mind, and, gasping with anticipation, she agrees in a stutter.

He cannot fit more than one finger in her arse; the tightness excites his imagination almost too much and makes him moan right along with her. Ellana squirms under his touch, making fists in her pillows. He laughs, kisses her hair, uses his other hand to prepare her eager quim for him. He enters her so easily, beginning the dance that their sex had become as if it were second nature.

 After he has come, pumping into her until she’s full of him, she turns and hooks her arms around his neck, making him stare into her exquisite, finely-boned face. He is overcome by it, like he always is; she seems too beautiful for her own good, like she was meant to be snatched at by the world’s million different greedy hands from the start.

“I _love_ you, kadan,” he tells her, raw, vulnerable, quiet.

Her fingers, small and frail compared with his own elephantine bones, make his skin want to shiver off him and join hers. “I love _you_ ,” she returns in a whisper. Her eyes flash, secret and impossible to deny.

Everything else was collateral.

 

 

 


End file.
